1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to a path balancing apparatus and method. In particular, the present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for workload balancing along multiple communication paths to a plurality of devices.
2. Description of Related Art
Systems are known in which multiple peripheral devices may be accessed by processing devices via multiple communication paths. Multiple processing devices may access the peripheral devices over the same communication path. Thus, some of these communication paths may be more utilized than others leading to an imbalance in the workloads for the communication paths. This situation may lead to a loss in throughput of the overall system.
As a solution to this problem, the known systems require the peripheral devices to be manually configured or new peripheral devices to be added to the system to compensate for the imbalance in workloads. However, this solution has proven unsatisfactory in that the workloads of the communication paths do not become adequately balanced.
Thus, a need is present for new technology to provide an apparatus and method for balancing workloads across a plurality of communication paths.